This is the scenario: I have my laptop on my right and my Son on my left, he decides that he wants to kick the laptop, so does, and before i can grab it, it's on the floor. The screen stays backlit but theres nothing on it. I reboot hoping that everything will be ok but it isn't. It posts ok and then attempts to boot with the windows 7 text on the screen. Normally after a few seconds the flying orbs come in and make the windows logo, but on this occasion doesnt. So i reboot again and it then gives me the option for startup repair. I run it and it takes an absolute age but finally finishes unsuccessfully. I read through the log and to my surprise most checks complete fine, apart from something called sptd.sys. I google this on my iphone and see a tutorial to make an ubuntu live cd and remove the file as it is only to do with daemon tools. I follow the instuctions remove the file and reboot. I now get the full windows logo so i think ive fixed it but then it just restarts. Next i try pressing f8 on boot and try booting into safe mode which doesnt work. I then tried inserting my windows 7 boot disk and starting a recovery which also doesnt work. I tired running startup repair again just in case but now that doesnt even run. The hard drive itself doesnt seem to be damaged as i can access it using ubuntu so i know i can at least backup my stuff if i DO need to reinstall windows but would obviously prefer not to. Has anyone got any suggestions on how to resolve this?

thats a bummer...unfortunately it does sound like a possible bad drive - especially if you were able to boot to ubuntu live cd and run it. Try downloading the harddrives manufacturers diagnostic utility and run it. http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

Forgive my level of dumbness but if the drive was damaged, would it then not be accessable via ubuntu? I booted tot the ubuntu GUI which recognised the laptop HDD which i was able to access without any issues. If i backed up my data and did a freash install of windows, do you think it would be likley to work?

parts of the drive could be good and parts of the drive could be bad. You can have damaged and it would not affect viewing it from other operating systems but it could prevent booting or cause other issues with the installed os. That is why I suggested running the drive diagnostic from the drive manufacturer. If the diagnostic shows nothing wrong then at least that possible cause is eliminated. You could try reinstalling but personally I would not trust the drive with anything important until at least a diagnostic utility has been run on it.

I get ya. I have just ordered a 1TB portable hard drive for backups and have another drive i can use in my laptop. i cant run diagnostics because the drive is made by toshiba and they currently dont have any diagnosics tools available according to link you gave me boooooooo

I didnt get your message until this morning but i connected my drive to my main computer and proceeded to try and backup my users folder, which proved difficult to say the least. MOST of my files moved over ok but the odd few wouldnt. I would get the error message Cyclic redundancy check. I skipped those files as most of them were not important to me and transfered the rest.

What i may do, dispite this technically being my fault, is to contact Toshiba (as my laptop is still under warrenty) and see if i can get a replacement, making out "it just stopped booting".

It's also worth noting that i ran checkdisk using my windows xp drive which corrected numerous errors but then halted at step 4 of 5 and would not continue. I left it for half an hour with it remaining at 0% on step 4 for the duration. I will give Hitachi's disk checking utility a go just in case i can rescue any extra files.

Just a quick update. I called the warranty company who said they could arrange someone to come and pick up the laptop and look at it which is good news. The only thing that worried me is that he said if they found that it was a software fault rather than a hardware fault then i woulnt be covered and i would have to pay £75 plus VAT.

This is the guys explination of what i should do (i dont agree with him by the way):

The laptop was preloaded with vista which i hate so i formatted when i first got the computer and installed windows xp instead. When windows 7 came out, i thought i would give it a whirl so purchased and installed it. As soon as i said this, he was like "oh, well there you go then, these systems were built with visa in mind and most of the people who have called us that have installed windows 7 get these sort of problems. He also stated that microsoft should made windows 7 only machines because they rarley run properly on any other machine (who trained this guy??!!) I also told him about the Cyclic redundancy check issue which he said was prodominantly software related??

Anyhoo!, rather than risk it i am going to use my recovery cd to get visa back on there (if it works) and give it a whirl. If it works great, if not ill send it off.

Forgive my level of dumbness but if the drive was damaged, would it then not be accessable via ubuntu? I booted tot the ubuntu GUI which recognised the laptop HDD which i was able to access without any issues. If i backed up my data and did a freash install of windows, do you think it would be likley to work?

I tried using the recovery cd to install windows xp again and it loaded setup files as usual and then rebooted as normal. It then came up with a bsod with the following:

STOP: C0000221 UNKNOWN HARD ERROR \SYSTEM ROOT\SYSTEM32\NTDLL.DLL

I then tried to do the same thing with the winows 7 installation disk to see if that made a difference. It again like XP loaded the setup files, rebooted and then proceeded with the setup checklist of: